When Bill Murray took a car for a joyride in the middle of a movie shoot: “The cops were yelling”
There’s only one person who can tell Bill Murray what to do, and it’s Bill Murray. The comedy icon has become famous for the mythology his offbeat antics have built up around him, but it turns out his eccentric behaviour isn’t strictly limited to his downtime between movies.
Whether it’s randomly tending bar, showing up to parties unannounced, photobombing happy couples, or generally making mischief wherever he goes, Murray has always marched to the beat of his own drum. He’s a singular spirit, but that hasn’t always been beneficial to the people he’s worked with.
The actor has been in more than a few feuds with co-stars and filmmakers alike, and that no-nonsense attitude has won him just as many admirers as it has enemies. There’s nobody quite like Murray, and those who haven’t been able to get on the same wavelength have discovered that to their detriment.
However, as Sofia Coppola can attest, it isn’t just the people he doesn’t get along with who’ve struggled to rein him in. She jumped through the requisite hoops to get him to sign on for Lost in Translation, and they’ve remained close ever since, which evidently isn’t enough to place the ‘Murricane’ on a shorter leash.
When the pair reunited almost two decades after their first film together for 2020’s dramedy On the Rocks, there was no reason to suspect any shenanigans would be afoot. After all, it’s a fairly straightforward story of Rashida Jones’ character reconnecting with her hedonistic father, driven by the ways in which families can either drift apart or grow closer over time.
In several scenes, Murray’s Felix Keane and Jones’ Laura share a car, which sounds mundane by Hollywood standards. And yet, Coppola admitted to The Hollywood Reporter that the actor was “very brave” for even getting in there with the Ghostbusters favourite, which sounds overblown until Jones told her side of the story.
“Bill fancies himself an amateur stunt driver,” she explained. “So he wanted to do as much of the driving as anybody would let him. And to be honest, he is a very good driver, but it was not comfortable. There was one time where he zoomed off, and you guys couldn’t find him.”
Coppola wasn’t best pleased that Murray had taken it upon himself to drive “out of the filming zone” for no reason other than wanting to. The filmmaker admitted that “the cops were yelling” at him to come back into the area that had been scheduled, staked out, and gathered the permits necessary for production, but he didn’t care.
“We got lights flashed on us, but I don’t know if we got pulled over,” Jones confessed. “It’s Bill; he got away with it.” On the Rocks doesn’t seem like it would provide fertile ground for the latest in Murray’s long line of improvised asides, but when he opted to speed away from the set and irritate law enforcement for his spur-of-the-moment joyride, his anarchic streak got the better of him once again.
